Your average employee spends over 45 minutes each day doing personal web surfing. This is costing your business around $4000 per employee per year. For a company with 300 employees, this is more than a million dollars per year.

What can companies do? Monitor employee computer activities. This has two benefits:

1- It acts as a deterrent. Similar to enforcing the speed limit on freeways, you don’t need a highway patrol car parked every mile. The fact that you could get a ticket at any given point is enough to make the majority of motorists stay reasonably close to the limit. The fact that an employee could get caught doing excessive personal web surfing is enough to keep the majority of employees in line.

2- It helps identify the problem employee. It’s not the employee that occasionally checks the weather, stock prices or news for a few minutes everyday that you need to worry about. It’s the employee that is spending hours of company time doing personal web surfing.

EffectivePro can not only monitor your employees, but it can help you find the major offenders with summary reports to help save your company money from employee ineffectiveness.

In a tough economy, companies cannot afford to waste money, yet many companies are hemorrhaging millions of dollars in unused software licenses. It’s not just the one time expense of purchasing the license, but the ongoing expenses associated with support contracts and upgrades.

Unused licenses are caused by more than downsizing employees. Many software applications are installed on company computers and never used again. If they are used, it is infrequently and the company would be better off with floating licenses.

But how do you know how many licenses you need? The answer is computer monitoring software like EffectivePro. EffectivePro logs software usage and then quickly summarizes the usage data in colorful reports with graphs so that you can make decisions to save your company millions of dollars.

Some companies are reluctant to use employee monitoring software. They think their employees will resent it as an invasion of privacy. At the same time, most companies don’t even think twice about placing cameras over cash registers, using RFID technology in employee badges to automatically track arrival and departure times, putting GPS tracking in company vehicles and employee cell phones, doing bookkeeping audits, placing metal or RFID detectors at company exits to prevent inventory from disappearing, searching briefcases, purses and backpacks when leaving work, and installing cameras outside of rooms containing valuable items. Embezzlement countermeasures are a necessary part of any company that wants to stay in business. One of the greatest sources of embezzlement at work is time wasted on personal web surfing. Perhaps the newness of Internet is what causes this reluctance, but eventually companies will learn that to be competitive in the marketplace, you can’t have employees that spend a large part of their day doing personal web surfing at work. With EffectivePro employee monitoring software, you don’t need to see what every employee is doing to find problems. Powerful reporting tools identify the gross offenders. When employees realize you are not virtually looking over their shoulder if they take five minutes to check their stock prices or bank balance, but that the software is scanning for those employees that spend four or five hours a day looking at porn, blogging or playing online games, they won’t feel like their privacy has been invaded. Employee monitoring software like EffectivePro makes good business sense.

Employee monitoring software like EffectivePro can be used for more than just identifying negative employee situations like wasting time on personal web surfing, illegal online activities, disclosing intellectual property and time card fraud. It can also be used to find out which employees are working the hardest. EffectivePro has power reports that summarize computer activities over a period of time. If some employees are really making the most of their time at work, or working extra hours when needed, EffectivePro reports can help you find these company heroes so that they can be rewarded.

Your business could be liable for the online actions of your employees, if you allow illegal computer activities to happen in the work place. For example, a few years ago, a US company was convicted of two felony charges and had to pay $100 million for allowing sensitive information to be sent to foreign countries. If an employee downloads and views pornography where other employees can see it, it could result in a sexual harassment lawsuit. If an employee orders illegal drugs from a work computer, and has them shipped to his or her office, even if the company is not found guilty, it could be damaging to your business reputation to see a team of DEA agents storm your office building on the six o’clock news. An employee could download and distribute child pornography, hack a financial institution, cyberbully a co-worker, release personal information about clients, distribute intellectual property to a competitor, operate an illegal gambling website, run a fraudulent Internet scheme, the list goes on and on. If these activities are allowed to happen at work, then the company could be liable or at least their reputation will be damaged. EffectivePro employee monitoring software provides power reports that summarize activities by employees that could be illegal so that situations can be handled before it is too late.

Blocking websites with a centralized network filter, or inline Internet filter, is only effective to a point. It prevents accidental loading of unauthorized websites, such as pornography, bandwidth intensive, illegal, virus infected, or time wasting websites. However, if an employee wants to bypass centralized network filtering they will figure out a way. There are a number of techniques such as proxy avoidance or virtual tunneling that will spoof the inline filter into thinking the website being loaded is different than the one actually being accessed. Even legitimate websites like Google Translate can be used for loading a website through a different Internet address. Employees may pick-up a nearby Wi-Fi signal or tether their cell phone to their work computer, bypassing the inline filter altogether. In addition to inline filters, businesses need to use client-based Internet filters such as EffectivePro. EffectivePro not only blocks websites, but also keeps a history of online activities so that filtering rules can be adapted to meet new threats. In addition, EffectivePro can be used to identify problem situations with excessive personal web surfing at work.

If an employee installs an unauthorized program on their computer, such as a file sharing (P2P) program or a video game, it can not only eat up your network bandwidth and cause employees to waste time, it can threaten your company’s security. Many of these programs are infected with spyware or viruses. This could cause your corporate intellectual property to be released to competitors. It could make you liable for copyright violation and result in a lawsuit if the software is unlicensed or is used to download unlicensed files. EffectivePro employee monitoring software provides you with tools to check your company computers remotely, even those outside the corporate firewall, for unauthorized software installations. Protect your company’s network and copyright compliance with EffectivePro employee monitoring software.

How can you know if your employees are working fewer hours than they report? Are some of your employees taking one hour smoke breaks and three hour lunches? Are there employees that typically arrive late or leave early, or both? Employee monitoring software is the answer. If your employees are normally working on the computer during the day, then EffectivePro will measure their work time automatically. EffectivePro has reports that show which employees work the longest and the shortest on average. It will show you which employees arrive late or leave earlier. Encourage your employees to be honest with their time and weed out the employees that are guilty of extreme time card fraud with EffectivePro employee monitoring software.

Are your employees viewing pornography during customer meetings? How can you know if they are attending the meetings off-site, outside of the corporate firewall? The cost of losing a customer contract as a result, and the cost of damaging your company’s reputation, can be staggering. Inline network filters are worthless for protecting you from these types of situations. Does your company have a traveling sales force? Do your employees meet with customers away from your company? If so, you need EffectivePro. EffectivePro will monitor employee computers or laptops inside or outside the company firewall. Since EffectivePro is web-based, you can check up on their computer activities in real-time. Remotely control situations that need to be addressed. Run reports to find company computer policy violators. Prevent employees from doing inappropriate web surfing during work time when they are in or out of the office with EffectivePro.

Most employees would not consider playing solitaire, or other video games, at work embezzlement. However, if it takes them twice as long to get their job due to video gaming distractions for the same pay, they might as well be taking money from the till. Employee computer monitoring software like EffectivePro helps keep employees honest. Since video games like solitaire do not generate any network traffic, a network monitoring system would never identify this problem. Only client-based computer monitoring software like EffectivePro can help discourage this form of wasting time. Encourage your employees to work effectively with EffectivePro.